


power is power

by brophigenia



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Behind the Scenes, Between 8X04 and 8X05 kind of, Canon Compliant, Cousin Incest, Dark Jon Snow, Emotions, F/M, Kinda, Manipulative Sansa, Past Abuse, Past Rape/Non-con, Ramsey Bolton Is His Own Warning, Vaginal Sex, and i wrote it, discussion of past rape, discussion of sexual violence, kind of, the night before jon goes south, unprotected sex, what the fuck, y'all i said i was gonna write it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-17
Updated: 2019-05-17
Packaged: 2020-03-07 02:42:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18864097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brophigenia/pseuds/brophigenia
Summary: Jon loves her, no matter how they are connected. Half-sister, cousin, Lord and Lady of Winterfell, Queen and King in the North, anything. Sansa could be anything to him, but she would still be this. She would still beSansa,and that will never change. No matter the games of war and death, there would always be a Stark in Winterfell. Sansa Stark would bend the knee to no man and no queen. Winterfell would burn and the North would fall before that changed.(Jon can see her always, behind his eyelids, can smell her scent like lemoncakes and the first snow of a long winter, can feel her in his arms, embracing him inhelloand ingoodbye.This will never change, either.)





	power is power

**Author's Note:**

> Throw me some comments. Tell me how you feel.

_ i rise from my scars  _

_ nothing hurts me now.  _

***

“You’ve never been raped.” Sansa tells him, matter-of-fact, in the dark of her mother’s former solar when everyone else is either asleep or too drunk to be afraid of the night, the cold, the now-slaughtered Dead. “You’ve never… But you were stabbed, weren’t you?” The question is direct, and her eyes are sharp when she turns them upon him. She knows the answer, but wants to make him  _ say it.  _

“Yes.” Jon makes his throat work enough to say, hoarse and furious and cold above all of it. He’s been cold since he came back. Since the Red Woman brought him back. That’s why it makes his Targaryen blood so hard to accept. One of the reasons, anyway. Weren’t the Dragonborn supposed to be hot? Fiery? He felt like ice. Like Snow. Like a bastard, still, unmoored and stumbling. 

“I haven’t been.” She tells him, plainly, making him understand in words he can parse. “But it’s like that, kind of. Imagine that you were stabbed, but not by a knife. By something alive, something that gave your attacker pleasure. You are dying, and the person killing you is breathless with how good it makes them feel. It’s like that, but worse. And your body is not your own, after. For…” she turns her gaze on the fire banked in the grate. “A very long time.” 

“Ramsey is dead.” Jon tells her, finally, rough. “His House is dead. The North is—“  _ yours,  _ he almost says, but it isn’t, not anymore. It is Daenerys’, and that is because of him. He’d ridden South to treat with the Dragon Queen and come home a traitor, and no matter that Sansa has never told him so, he knows that she will never forgive him for it. “Alive.” He settles on, at length, and it’s clumsy but he’s never had her talent for wordplay. It’s something he has had to accept for himself, his rough manners and his inability to play the game like a king must. He’d have been a terrible king. Didn’t have the head for it, or the heart. Only had the loyalty and the duty, and that was not the making of a king worthy of seven kingdoms, nor the only one that  _ really  _ mattered. 

(The North. He’d damn the rest to their own devices, if it meant the North would remain. If it meant Sansa would remain in Winterfell with him for the rest of their days, that he could look up from the training yard and gaze at her upon the ramparts, watching him with eyes that no longer seemed Tully blue but instead were the exact color of the frozen waters north of the Wall.) 

“Oh, Jon,” she murmured, and turned her face even further from him, burying it into the fur lining the shoulders of her cloak that she still wore even with the late hour, even with the warmth of the room, though he knew she felt the cold even less than he did. “He could be dead for twenty years. The memory of the Boltons could be erased. The whole North could be secure. None of it would take away the nightmares. The fear that I will lose it all. Again.” 

His fists clench, and he shakes, feeling more terribly impotent and foolish than he ever has. Imagines the sort of horrors that lurch from the darkest corners of her memory to take her down with them at night. Imagines her waking in a cold sweat, terrorized, alone. Imagines how he’s spent his  _ own  _ nights, away from her and his duties, away from Winterfell. In the arms of Daenerys Stormborn, who would take the North from them and not even see it as a theft. 

“Sansa.” He says, so plaintively it shakes him. He should not beg her for comfort like this. Not when  _ she _ is the one he is trying to comfort. 

“Jon.” She says, and for only a second sounds like a frightened child, sounds like the girl who would sleep in a pile with him and their other siblings for warmth and comfort, a pile of wolf pups curled around a dragon like doves about a cuckoo, unawares. She had known him for a fraud from the start, even if she’d not known what to call it. To call  _ him,  _ beyond  _ bastard half-brother.  _ Robb had been called the Young Wolf, had been fabled to be a  _ real  _ wolf, a skinchanger and a sorcerer. 

Sansa, with her predator-pale eyes and her frigid manner, had been the real wolf all along. Had been able to  _ smell _ it on him, the fire and the blood. 

He is upon his knees before her on the flagstones even before he decides to move. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, fierce and begging,  _ begging,  _ when he would not have begged for his own  _ life.  _ He is no craven, and yet finds his mouth shaping the words so easily. “Sansa, Sansa, I’m  _ sorry.”  _ And it is all for naught, because he will still leave on the morrow, at the beckoning of his— his queen. His aunt. His latest in a lifetime of oaths broken, twice- or thrice-over. 

She was still for a moment, like she was already a stone sculpture in the crypt, the thought of which made him nauseous with revulsion and fear. Sansa, remembered by no one, another in the line of Starks who died because they had placed their faith in the wrong king. 

She broke like the ice on the stream that ran through the Godswood on the first truly warm day of early spring, her ungloved fingers winding into his hair and holding his face against her skirts, buried in her lap. “Shhh,” she hummed, comforting as a mother might be to a child frightened in the night, entertaining his terror but not sharing it. “I know. I know.” And the scent of her— the  _ scent  _ of her. He was on his knees and he was shamefully hot beneath his clothes, hotter than he’d been in all the days since the flames had rebirthed him. 

He could smell her, through the lemon oils she used to dress her hair and the chilly bite of snowfall, smell her  _ heat.  _ Salt and the blackstrap molasses Old Nan always poured into the snow to treat them with candy when the winter had gone harsh and the sugar stores had gone low. He groaned low in his throat and  _ wanted _ her, his desires as baseborn as the bastard they’d made of him, Lyanna and Rhaegar and Father, too.  _ The Lord’s Kiss,  _ he’d heard it called, as if it were something to be bestowed as a high honor upon some trembling highborn maid and not the thing that made him weakest at the knees. 

He knelt and breathed her in through the heavy layers of her wool skirts, shoulders trembling, and she kept her hand wound in his hair. She had to know.  _ Had _ to be  _ aware, _ with his cockstand pressed against her clothed shins, no secret. No artifice. His sister, she had been his  _ sister,  _ only not  _ really,  _ and he did not think  _ sister  _ when he looked at her. Only  _ Sansa.  _

He’d lain, in his life, with a freewoman and a queen, respectively. Neither was Sansa, who had been battered against the stones she’d been chained to in the center of a political sea, who had drowned in cruelty and pain and betrayal and risen like one of the Ironborn, like Theon’s Drowned God, stronger than steel. Sansa, who had once been the Maiden and now was the Stranger, face impassive but icy eyes  _ burning. _

Sansa, who was strong where he was weak, and he wrapped a hand around one of her slim ankles, beneath her skirts. She’d taken off her boots, her only concession to comfort in this close, warm little room that had once been bright and full of ladies-in-waiting and children and  _ security.  _ Her stockings were woolen, not the silk she’d demanded even as a child of seven. She’d always wanted fine things as a girl, fine things like were mentioned in the songs she’d always loved. 

Her breath hitched, almost imperceptibly, when he touched her. He drew his head up from her lap and looked at her and knew she could see how dark his eyes had become, black as night instead of Targaryen violet. Gods, but he was glad of that. He did not want to be a Targaryen in this room. He wanted to be a  _ Stark,  _ no matter how depraved that made him. He wished he  _ was  _ her brother, wished that there had been no secret, no lie, no Tower of Joy, no selfish elopement. He wished all of these things but also wished to put his hands upon her naked flesh, wished to be her brother and her lover both, if only because it would mean he was not doomed to leave the North and follow Daenerys south to wage a war he wanted no part of. 

He’d build an entire Wall between Winterfell and the rest of the world, if he could, brick by brick. He would be Jon the Builder, no matter that he had no experience in stonemasonry. No matter that the only thing he’d ever been good at was killing, animals and people and Wights and happiness. 

“Jon,” Sansa said, and touched his mouth with the very barest brush of her fingertips, softer than the softest kiss. “My body is my own.” She whispered. “Ramsey Bolton is dead. The Bolton House is no more. The North survives. And yet now my nightmares are worse than ever. Do not ride South. Do not die for  _ her.”  _ It was as close to begging as he could imagine her deigning to perform. She’d always been braver than him, more steadfast. She’d not had a sword to wield, had not had her direwolf at her side, had no way to defend herself from the beatings and the violations and the hopelessness except the defenses she could forge for herself out of information and carefully-placed words. 

“I have to.” He all but sobbed, throat aching. “I  _ have to.”  _ He did not say  _ she will kill you. She will do to Winterfell what Aegon Targaryen did to Harrenhal.  _ Sansa knew. She knew that the words were useless, and she knew that resistance was futile. Still she had asked, and for the first time since he’d left for Castle Black the very first time, she seemed the child she’d been, the she-pup who’d loved silks and stories and lemoncakes above all else. 

“Don’t leave me.” She murmured, and leant forward until he was curtained by her hair, bright as fire all around him. “Jon, stay. Stay with me.” Her knees spread as she spoke, bracketing his ribs on either side. She pressed a drugging kiss to his lips, one and then another and another until he was shuddering beneath each one, until he could not stop himself from curling his hands around the backs of her wool-stockinged knees, up under her skirts, so close to where he wanted to be. 

He’d infected her with this— with his base perversion. Had  _ done _ this to her— of that, there could be no doubt. “Stay with me,” she repeated, over and over, as she twined her arms and legs around him. 

“I can’t, I can’t,” he wept into her throat, pressing kisses to her chin. 

“You  _ can,”  _ she insisted, and then had his breeches open with some kind of nimble-fingered magic. Some lustful sorcery that would’ve outdone even the Red Priestess Melisandre had her skirts untangled from their grasping, greedy limbs and up around her waist. She was bare, beneath all of it. No smallclothes. Another testament to her Stark blood— to her imperviousness to the bone-deep chill that had Southron women like Missandei triple-wrapped from the tops of their heads to the tips of their toes. He gasped like a green boy on his first trip to Wintertown and then was  _ within her, _ and she held him so close to her that he could not breathe for it. 

“Stay, stay,” she breathed like a lullaby in his ear until he finished, deep inside, too-quick, but she did not release him, and instead allowed him to drag her down off of the settee and onto the floor in front of the fire, where her hair spilled across the flagstones and the threadbare carpet like blood. Again he stiffened and again she held him close, her eyes closed and her nails dug into his back.

And he  _ loves  _ her. Gasps it over and over, hysterical, even as she shushes him, even as her tears spill over and drip down the sides of her face to dampen her hair and he kisses the trails of them, licks the salt from her skin. 

This time when he finishes she releases him, and lies with her eyes closed on the ground like she will never move again. He straightens her skirt as much as he can, drawing it back down her trembling legs until she is covered again, as if he is tucking a babe into bed. Gentle. In a reckless, aching moment he thinks that he would burn the whole world down to be able to spend the rest of his days treating her  _ gently,  _ as she deserves. 

He rises instead of laying down beside her, stands on his feet and memorizes the look of her there, face peaceful enough for her to be asleep, if he did not know that she found no solace in her dreams. He does not say goodbye. Cannot bear to make promises he does not think he will be able to keep. Not to Sansa. Not again. 

She slits her eyes open to watch him through the fringe of her lashes. To watch him leave. Keeps her thighs pressed tight together, her hand curved around her lower abdomen, her mouth moving in a silent prayer to the Old Gods. 

He loves her. 

Jon  _ loves _ her, no matter how they are connected. Half-sister, cousin, Lord and Lady of Winterfell, Queen and King in the North, anything. Sansa could be  _ anything _ to him, but she would still be  _ this. _ She would still be Sansa, and that will never change. No matter the games of war and death, there would always be a Stark in Winterfell. Sansa Stark would bend the knee to no man and no queen. Winterfell would burn and the North would fall before that changed. 

(Jon can see her always, behind his eyelids, can smell her scent like lemoncakes and the first snow of a long winter, can feel her in his arms, embracing him in  _ hello _ and in  _ goodbye. _ This will never change, either.) 

The thought of going South ties his stomach into knots even as he leaves the gates of Winterfell, even as he leaves the banner-laden walls of the place that had always been and  _ would  _ always be his home. Every step his horse takes South makes him full up of even more dread. 

This is his duty; this is what he had signed up for, when he bent the knee to the hottest-blooded woman he’d ever met, trying to thaw himself. Wanting to believe. Wanting to give away his own vestments and not thinking of the implications. Weak. He’d been so weak. So tired. 

And now he was going to die. Wolfblooded men did not go to King’s Landing and come home. 

Sansa stands hidden upon the ramparts. He can feel her gaze upon his back. 

***

_ now i picture you like snowflakes,  _

_ like desperate pouring  rain.  _

**Author's Note:**

> follow me @ brophigenia.tumblr.com


End file.
